Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1718627440 | Hacker News Reader

But you generally want to communicate with that process, so you do need to setup e.g. file descriptors and stuff, which needs information from the parent process to be passed.

View on HN

Yes, you do want to pass in some stuff. But by default you get every single open file descriptor and a copy of every single stack that any threads use for execution.

It shares way too much, and have huge use cases where it is really, really bad.

A variant of exec could take an initial table of file descriptors in the current process that get cloned into the new child. Pipe creation could also get rolled into this mechanism. That should take care of the most obvious leaky bit of fork()/exec(), at least.

Keep in mind that this is the only way to start any process. Even if you just want to launch some throwaway utility program.

Most programming languages abstract this out to be able to connect or drop the 3 standard pipes. Typically this is the only thing that can be shared anyway unless the other program is specifically shared and expects other file handles to be available, in which case fork might be the right system call anyway.

Right. It's not that fork is useless, it's that it's weird that it's the only way to do this thing that it isn't particularly well suited for.

Nevertheless, inclusion would be a better default than exclusion in most use cases I've ever had for process spawning.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com